domingo, 26 de setembro de 2010

sexta-feira, 24 de setembro de 2010

Warnning: don´t try this at home, unless you have tasty wheat bread and tomatos direct from the garden!

It´s just no use making it with those tastless tomatos from greenhouses, or with that white defrosted kind of bread.

This is probabily my favorite summer dish, simple, tasty, good to eat with cheese, deep fried or griled fish, or ham...It is very easy to do. Pill the tomatos and clean the pips. Don´t immerse them in hot water to pill them, as the surface would get a bit boiled, and that´s not ok. Crush the garlic and a pinch of salt in a mortar until you get a smooth pulp. Then add a bit of olive oil and some bread, and keep pounding and crushing. Then add some bits of tomato, crush, some more bread and tomato and olive oil, crush until you get a red pulp (I´t doesn´t matter if you still have whole bits of bread and tomato)This takes a lot of olive oil. In a bowl put the sliced tomato and bread, pour the pulp, stir, taste for salt and let it rest for a couple of minutes before eating (or you can keep it for a couple of hours before serving)Hey Nigela Lawson, if you are out there in cyberspace, give me a call.

The ingredients just for one. I ended up using only one and a half of those slices of bread. You use more tomato than bread (3:1).

segunda-feira, 13 de setembro de 2010

domingo, 12 de setembro de 2010

Here are some photos of the memorable concert by Leonard Cohen in the Pavilhão Atlântico. They are a bit shaken, but the camera is not to blame, it´s just that I was singing along while photographing. Leonard Cohen, 75, performed three hours and sang some new songs. I guess this concert could be called "Songs of despair and hope". He has been writing some of the most beautifull poems about love, about the terrible prospects for humankind, and the possibilities of salvation, be it through love, satori or the comming of the Messiah. I´m among those who listen to him like to an oracle ("I don´t give a dam about the true, except for the naked true") and if the session is served with excelent poetry and virtuoso performers, it´s perfect. I got the impression that some of his most desperate songs were performed in the first half, and the most hopeful ones in the second... When my time comes and I say to S. Peter that I atended all the concerts Leonard Cohen gave in Portugal, I´m sure he´ll say "Ok, come in."

A sample of hairstyles:

I saw this site specific sculputre in Gulbenkian gardens, by the brasilian artist Barrão:

segunda-feira, 6 de setembro de 2010

Back in 1992 I wrote a letter to Mr. Peter Matthiessen asking him if I could go practice Zen Buddhism in his zen center in Long Island. He was kind enough to write me back saying he didn´t have living quarters there, and he advised me to go to the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, which I did, for a month.Last August, 25, I read an article about him in the spanish-catalan newspaper La Vanguardia. An excert:

If we mention his role in the foundation of the legendary magazine The Paris Review, the first to publish Kerouac and Pkilip Roth, and also important literary interviews, we enter a spies thriler. "Once, when I was studying in Yale, a professor asked me «What do you think of serving your country working for the CIA in Paris?» At the time I had no money nor work, CIA still had a clean name, Paris was the dream of every aspiring writer, and to work as a spy sounded the most exciting. They gave a list of suspects from whom I would have to get informations. I needed a cover up, in case the police would interrogate me, and thus The Paris Review was born. After one year I quit. I was afraid...Even today they could sue me for telling you this, but I doubt this old man is any kind of threat for them."

I knew that many materials and gadgets that make life easier, derive from military investigation and industry (washing machines, the internet, passengers airplanes, toilet paper, tv sets, paints, and the list goes on, althoug I´m not sure of some of the above...). Now, it came as a big surprise to know that even in the art domain we benefit from the military. The Hindus worship a Godess of war and destruction. I feel I´ve been further from converting to Hinduism.

In the photo above, among diferent objects that Peter Matthiessen collected from the shore and fields, I saw some dolphin vertebrae, similar to these I collected from the beach. These bones are beautiful.

Some years ago, in a café by the road, I noticed some pack on the shelf where there was writen 5X33. I calculated it and noticed that the 6 in the middle of 165 was the sum of 1 and 5. Then I realised that, in most cases, the same aplyed if I multiplied a single digit by a number with two repeated digits (3X66=198, or 5X55=275...)Later I made a table like the one in this unfinished canvas. The digits from one to nine are represented by areas defined by diferent colors: the rectangle in the yellow line for 2, the triangle in the white line for 1, the other rectangle in brown for 7, and more irregular areas for the other digits. Notice that all the areas have the same line of simetry. The 3 in light green, the 8 in red... The 9 (in black) is a special case because it seems to have two areas: a square in the middle and a big area ocupying the right lower side. The zero is the perpendicular line (not represented) linking the zeros on the left. Multiplications with bigger numbers also have interesting results: 4X33=1332, or 3X777=2331, etc. I don´t know if this is new or if it has already been thought of and writen. This is not complicated mathematics, it is quite simple. Most of all I like the aesthetics of it, and to imagine a whole crazy and irrelevant branch of mathematics deriving from this, with specific sets of operations, rules, theories, and its own paradoxes.